By KATE TAYLOR

ESTRELLITA BRODSKY

“Here was this kid, who probably felt like a little bit of an outsider
. . . who now felt proud about his heritage.”

Estrellita Brodsky’s life is not that of your typical graduate student. Instead of frugal dinners , there are $1,000-a-head museum galas. Home is an apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan, not a share with roommates. And although she is hoping to finish her dissertation, which focuses on Latin American artists in postwar Paris, by January, Ms. Brodsky is not planning to enter the academic job market any time soon.

Instead she is devoting energy these days to figuring out how to use her wealth and connections as one of the city’s leading arts philanthropists, along with her scholarly perspective gained from her studies at New York University, to raise the profile of Latin American art.

For two years Ms. Brodsky has endowed the post of the Latin American art curator at the Museum of Modern Art, held by Luis Perez-Oramas. Her encouragement led Harvard University to create a position for a Latin American art specialist in its history of art and architecture department. Currently she is in discussions with the Harvard Art Museum about financing Latin American acquisitions.

Ms. Brodsky recently presided as chairwoman at the opening night on November 13 of Pinta, a Latin American art fair in its second year in New York. Mauro Herlitzka, a co-director of Pinta, said she was an obvious choice not just because of her prominence as a collector, philanthropist and society figure - she is married to the real estate scion Daniel Brodsky - but also because of her scholarly background.

“She’s very comprehensive in her understanding” of the Latin American art world, he said.“She supports it at MoMA, and she’s also involved with curatorship.”

Only in the last 15 years have scholars fully embraced the contributions of Latin American artists to 20th-century abstract movements. At the same time the rise of international art fairs has brought greater attention to contemporary artists working in Latin America.

Growing up in New York City in the 1950s and ‘60s, with parents who had immigrated from Venezuela and Uruguay, Ms. Brodsky, 56, said she learned how ignorant most of her young peers were about Latin America.

“It was pretty much, ‘Oh, were your parents Indians, living in the jungle-’ ” she said of her classmates in the fourth or fifth grade. Her great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side, Juan Idiarte Borda, was the president of Uruguay.

In 1995 a friend enlisted her to help organize an exhibition on the Taino, pre- Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean, at El Museo del Barrio. She traveled to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba helping to arrange loans. The overall experience was transformative, she said.

In a visitors’ book at the exhibition, she recalled, “A little kid said, ‘My name is Taino, and I’m so happy now to learn what I’m named after.’ I thought that was so cute: Here was this kid, who probably felt like a little bit of an outsider because he had this strange name, who now felt proud about his heritage.”

Ms. Brodsky eventually rose to become the museum board’s chairwoman. She decided to go back to school for a doctorate and is completing her dissertation at the Institute of Fine Arts at N.Y.U.

Ms. Brodsky said she saw herself as part of a group of people who are helping to raise the status of Latin American art. With the growing number of Latin American immigrants in the United States, she suggested, their effort has gained momentum.“The timing is right,” she said.